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President Talabani offers Iraqi pilots
safe haven
31.10.2005
By Toby Harnden, London Sunday Telegraph
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SULAYMANIYAH,
Kurdistan (Iraq) - President Jalal Talabani is
offering safe haven and -- according to some sources
- $1,000 cash payments to deposed dictator Saddam
Hussein's former air force pilots, several of whom
have been systematically killed.
The president said his purpose in reaching out to
the officers -- overwhelmingly from Saddam's favored
Sunni sect -- is to woo them away from the
insurgency and break up their alliance of
convenience with Islamist foreign fighters.
Mr. Talabani, a Kurd, said he met recently with more
than 1,000 former Iraqi officers in Baghdad. |
Iraqi
President : Jalal Talabani
Photo: Reuters |
Afterward, according to coalition sources, Kurdish
officials entered the room and set briefcases down
on tables. The briefcases were opened to reveal wads
of new $100 bills; each officer was given $1,000 as
compensation for the loss of his pension.
"I openly called in a meeting I had with 1,000 Arab
Sunni former high-ranking officers for them to come
to Kurdistan and live in peace," Mr. Talabani said
in an interview.
He said he was unsure who was killing the pilots,
but suggested it was in retaliation for war crimes.
"I don't know whether it is revenge for bombing
civilians, for bombing Iran, for bombing Kurdistan."
An estimated 300,000 Kurds died in the Anfal
campaign of 1988, in which chemical weapons were
dropped on Kurdistan and mass executions carried
out. Among the atrocities was the massacre at
Halabja, on the Iranian border, in which Iraqi
pilots killed around 5,000 Kurds with poison gas
bombs.
But in an extraordinary expression of mercy, Mr.
Talabani has forgiven the perpetrators, though not
those who planned the genocide.
The pilots "were ordered by military commanders," he
said. "During the time of Saddam, anyone who refused
orders was killed. And not everyone was ready to
take his aircraft and fly to London or some other
place and ask to be a refugee because Saddam would
have killed their family."
One of the pilots to be killed was Ismael Saeed
Fares, 48, known as "the Hawk of Baghdad" because of
his legendary exploits. A series of daring raids at
the end of the eight-year war with Iran earned him a
string of medals and the admiration of millions.
They also earned him 24 bullets in his chest, fired
at point-blank range by a gunman who struck as he
sat with a neighbor in the garden of his home in
north Baghdad earlier this year.
Scores of others are believed to have been killed,
although precise figures are not available. There is
no suggestion that Mr. Fares was involved in the
anti-Kurdish atrocities of the Anfal campaign.
The organized manner in which the slayings have been
carried out, each with multiple shots fired from an
AK-47, has fueled suspicions that elements within
Iraq's government are behind them.
"Many of my father's friends have already left Iraq
for Jordan because they received written death
threats warning them to leave," said Mr. Fares' son,
Wisam, 21.
Victim's families suspect their names and addresses
have been taken from old records at the Iraqi
Defense Ministry. They claim that the killings are
the work of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
one of the two main Shi'ite parties that dominate
Iraq's new government.
Although the Badr Brigade has officially disarmed,
it has recently been blamed for the killing of
scores of Sunni clerics in revenge for massacres of
Shi'ites carried out by Sunni-backed insurgents.
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